At the concert, Alexander Refsum Jensenius and I performed our piece Transformation, exploring improvisation in time and space during this concert that also featured pieces by Henrik Hellstenius, Thomas Dahl and an improvisation by Victoria Johnson and Peter Tornquist.

Alexander and I have been collaborating for several years on exploration of various types of technologies for musical expression. The piece currently presented is based on video analysis using modules from the Musical Gestures Toolbox in Jamoma and CataRT.

By moving inside a seemingly empty space, I have slowly explored a sonic landscape of thousands of short fragments of various violin sounds. The space thus becomes a musical entity in itself, a space that the violinist both controls and interacts with at the same time. What seemed to be an empty space at first, is left as a sonic space in our memory when the piece ends.

For Victoria Counting IV we used the new visual ideas from the workshop (see previous posts), and added a new direction, made mainly by Henrik Hellstenius. The new direction made me very busy on stage, at first sitting on a low stool, after a while started to run when playing, and looking for my lost photos when at the same time looking at all the photos from my life.

I have decided to make a new version of Victoria Counts by Henrik Hellstenius without video and with a new version of the staging. Henrik has decided to do the main work with the new staging himself, being the person who knows the piece the best (together with me :-D).

A visual idea, using pictures from my life on the floor, almost invading me on stage. Another idea is to cut up the music in small pieces and let me search for them. Using long music stands, too long for actually looking, or very small, so that I have to sit on the floor or on a stool, almost kneeling in a kind of meditation pose. Henrik also wanted to try out using mirrors, mirroring myself, but also the audience, so that they can mirror themselves in the chaos that sometimes emerges on stage.

The music is cut into pieces, and I am kneeling in front of the small music stand.

Henrik also wanted to let me speak about my relation to the piece and how I related to the main topic, distraction vs. focus, stress versus peace, all directed and held together by the counting exercise by Gurdjieff. He wanted me to record my reflections, and also asking myself questions about the main topic. Henrik has made a mix of the sound files, and we are going to try using it in the piece to strengthen the audience’s understanding of the main topic. Each time I work with this piece and have to be confronted with my life, it always makes me emotional. It’s very difficult to keep a distance when the whole thing is actually about your own stuff.

Henrik and Victoria trying out putting photos of Victoria's life on the floor

Sunniva Bodvin, who is going to be the scenographer in my project, was a great help, seeing all the new props from the outside. We will be able to evaluate the new staging and the new props, and how it influences the piece, on the concert on Sep 3. Strangely enough, after working with Victoria counts for almost 4 years, we still do not completely know how to express the core of the piece. The music is very abstract, but of course, it also has various dramatical levels. It moves from almost total silence to cacophonies of domestic sounds; my voice, almost screaming, counting, sound processing and loud violin playing.

On december 18th 2009 was in Oslo concert-hall listening/watching Leif Ove Andsnes and the south African visual artist Robin Rohde performance. Their aim has been to make the “impossible possible, and how put visuals to music in a way that the visuals builds up the musical material and gives unity”.

The program consisted of different classical pierces and one more modern by Lacher with prepared piano

On May 7th Mattias Arvasstson and I had our performance at the Museum of contemporary Art in Oslo. We tried out the idea of using the movement, colours and pulsation of the video as a musical score, using Mattias,s object for projection. That meant that we did not have to have any walls for projection and did not have to interfere into the exhibition as such. Originally it had been the meaning that the concert installation should take place in the big exhibition room. It is very light in Norway during the summertime and i realised that during one of the visits to the museum that this room was much too light for projection. We ended up to get a beautiful empty room at the second floor. Many thanks to Anna Lindblad at the the Museum of Contemporary Art who helped us to get this space and to arrange the concert.

On photo: The original space for the performance.

For the first time I played a concert without any soundperson there. I realised that the acoustics changed a bit when the audience came, and I think I will bring a stage monitor for the next performance. I used 6 genelecs, one on the object and the one with pure violinsound behind me, and the rest in in each corner. Again I used the a granulation process using 3 buffers with different lengths, pitching and grainlength. Thanks to Edvin Østvik for the beautiful and user-friendly maxpatch !We had to carry all the equipment ourself which was really hard!

After rigging up we got visitors from the Academy of music, the electroacoustic composition class came to see what we where doing.

On photo: The performance space

Having 9 footpedals I got a very broad setup. I am looking forward to experiment more with some smaller controllers and setup.

I will also for the next performance have visual monitor in order to see the visuals better.

It has been a very busy but interesting process working and performing the two Satellite concerts. The first one taking place at the Roof of the Norwegian opera and Ballet April 28 and the second one in a beautiful big space at the Museum of contemporary Art. Being in charge of the planning of the operaroof I had to go into the topic of projection, choice of lenses, amount of ansilumens when the goal is to have the projection as clear and big as possible. The size of the wall we wanted to project on was 14.5x 32 meters, and sunset was around 9 pm. I decided to go for 10 pm and hoped for good weather. I also had a “bad weather plan” hiring party -tents, but fortunately I did not have to go for that. On the actual day it was some scary black cloud, but it never rained! A bit cold though about 10 degrees.

To rig up PA and projectors took more planning than I would have thought. It felt like having a concert on the top of a mountain except that we had access to electricity. I got very good support and help from Knut Vik and lot of people from the Academy of Music helped to rig down after the concert. I had decided because of the wind not to use music but have it on a PDF on the computer. Ivar Frouberg had made me a beautiful little maxpatch that could turn pages. I worked very well and secure. I was practising with the patch for about a week, in order to be able to use the foot for turning the pages (Yamaha midi FC) as well as using other pedals (fuzz, octaver, delay) For Elektra I also had to follow the maxpatch (triggers and timing) on another computer. All this technical issues worked out very well, although I from time to time during Elektra was very busy!

To get the projection as big as we got it worked out well, surrounded by the city on the big marmoreal roof. The volcano in Elektra became huge, and I became very small, which I see as an interesting contrast. The fact that the size of the projection was so big made a better communication between the music and the video. At the most I think it was around 400 people at the roof, something I founded very good.

Thanks to Ellen Roed who took some photos!

I got a lot of press on the project, also at Østlandsendingen (TV)
For links (in Norwegian only see links)

Last Wednesday 14.1 I had a small workshop with the contemporary music interpretationclass at the State Academy. I made a short introduction about my project, but very soon moved into practical use of 2 different max patches. I let the students improvise with 11 sec delay with a great amout of rewerb. It is the same patch I use for Arne Nordheim Partita für Paul. The students used a condensator mic so we had to be really careful with feedback. I do not have these problems on the electric violin so I am not used to deal with that challenge. After we worked with a granulationpacth I have used a lot in Fat Battery. In the end I did some basic improvsiation in LIVE which I think the students enjoyed the most.

November 28
Concert Mannheim Signale Festival with Fat Battery.
The last concert this year was in Mannheim at the contemporary festival Signale organized by Dennis Kuhn and Siegfried Kutterer. Fat Battery played as a quartet without percussion, with lot of percussive sounds at Thorolf,s computer.
We played our set together with the two fantastic percussionists from Basel Symphony Orchestra: Szilàrd Buti and Domenico Melchiorre playing Siegfried Kutterer: “Straight Inside” in between our improvisations. Other pieces like Xenakis,s “Psappha” where combined with Vaages Multimorf II played by Thorolf Thuestad and myself.
I was impressed how this concertconcept managed to combine traditional contemporary music (a lot of different percussion pieces where performed by a huge ensemble) improvisation, sound sculpture, performance and videopieces like Corpoel and Psychodrama by Vinko Globokar. The concert where presented in a very professional way. Sound and light was here and at the concert at Basel Theater a month before was on a very high level.
The critics in the newspaper Reinpfals wrote: “The tones on the violin was unconventional they where silent, flutelike or rattling creatively manipulated by the electronics”October 27
Concert NMH
own works with Peter Tornquist live electronics
This concert was an experiment starting from scratch. Peter and I had not decided a single thing before we went on stage. The whole performance was fully improvised, maybe going on a bit too long.
The new thing was the setup using my Genelec 5.1 from my studio together with the speakers in the Levin hall leaving the center speaker for the violin.
We wanted to achieve a feeling that the sound came from the sound source, a feeling we did not have at the Ultima concert.

Jamomaworkshop, photo: Alexander Refsum Jensenius

October 20
Jamoma workshop at the University of Oslo 3 hour introduction to Jamoma at the UIO fourMs lab.